Canada Still Fueling Modern Slavery, One Year Later – Pivot

At a conference this week, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, explained his findings and recommendations regarding the injustices experienced by migrant workers. A year after his visit to Canada, the situation has changed little.

Last Tuesday, the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Tomoya Obokata, was invited to present the results of his investigation in Canada, during a conference organized by Amnesty International Canada Francophone and the Réseau d’aide aux travailleurs migrants agricoles du Québec (RATTMAQ).

Migrant workers and the Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre also spoke in support of the rapporteur’s findings.

A year ago, following an investigation in five Canadian cities, including Montreal, the rapporteur immediately declared that Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) was fertile ground for contemporary forms of slavery.

Last month, the rapporteur released his final report, which he then submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in early September. In it, he maintained his findings that the TFWP poses serious risks of modern slavery.

In his lecture and report, Professor Tomoya Obokata criticises that the TFWP makes workers dependent on their employers and allows the latter to exercise control over their migration status, as well as their access to housing and healthcare.

He reports that because of this power asymmetry, temporary foreign workers are susceptible to all sorts of abuses: confiscation of wages, physical, psychological and verbal violence, excessive working hours, lack of personal protective equipment, etc.

In his report, Tomoya Obokata recommends that Canada issue “open” work permits to migrant workers, which would allow them to freely choose their employer, regardless of the sector.

It also suggests that better access to permanent residency could alleviate the structural precarity in which temporary workers find themselves.

RESTRICTIVE WORK PERMITS

Under the TFWP, workers are issued a so-called “closed” work permit, tied to a single employer. Once the holder is fired, he or she risks losing his or her status and being deported to his or her home country.

Although they could in principle try to change employers, temporary workers must pay the cost of applying for a new permit, find another employer willing to hire them and invest in a costly labour market impact assessment procedure. This is therefore unrealistic for many workers who do not have the information and means to do so.

Since 2019, people who have been abused by their current employer can apply for an “open work permit for vulnerable workers,” which is valid for one year. But since the end of 2023, the processing time for this special permit has been several months. In addition, the heavy burden of gathering evidence of abuse falls on the shoulders of the applicants.

Over the past year, the Canadian government and private sector employers have publicly challenged the rapporteur’s findings as excessive and that closed permits were useful. Migrant worker advocacy groups have largely endorsed his recommendations.

At the conference, Bénédicte Carole Zé, a former migrant worker who herself had suffered several forms of abuse and exploitation, said that Professor Tomoya Obokata’s report was faithful to the reality that migrant workers experience on a daily basis.

“The government is complicit in the mistreatment that these people experience,” she denounced. “Opening up the work permit means giving everyone the right to have a choice, to be able to say “no” to a form of mistreatment, to be able to feel equal to another human being.”

One year later

The UN special rapporteur’s initial statements last fall prompted Canada to reexamine its migration policies over the past year.

Shortly after the rapporteur’s visit, the Canadian and Quebec immigration ministries both commissioned a study on the closed work permit.

Last May, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology released a report on the same subject, in which it recommended the abolition of closed work permits.

More recently, the Superior Court of Quebec has just authorized the Association for the Rights of House and Farm Workers to bring a class action against the federal government to have the closed work permit declared contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Despite seemingly positive developments, migrant worker advocacy groups fear that closed work permits will only be replaced by sectoral or regional permits, forcing employees who want to leave their employer to remain in a specific employment area or area. Such a solution is far from the open permits they have always demanded.

In June, the federal government promised to issue sectoral permits by 2027 to temporary foreign workers in the agri-food sector.

According to Tomoya Obokata and rights groups, in many cases employers in certain sectors know each other, so sector permit holders are often unable to change employers because of the stigma they face.

“Sectoral and regional work permits are basically closed work permits by another name,” said Aditya Rao, founding member of the Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre. “Even if someone has a regional work permit, it does not allow them to exercise their right to freedom of mobility.”

“What the government has done to date are band-aid measures to try to mitigate the abuses, but they will not solve the root problems,” Marisa Berry Méndez, head of the migrant workers’ rights campaign at Amnesty International Canada Francophone, told us in an interview.

Jurisdictional gaps

Although temporary foreign workers have in principle the same labour rights as all workers, the UN Special Rapporteur found that jurisdictional gaps largely prevent them from exercising these rights.

In his report, Tomoya Obokata criticized the Canadian government for delegating a significant portion of the responsibility to employers to inform temporary foreign workers of their rights, despite the conflict of interest this creates.

By email, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada responded to us that “Canada has implemented several measures to combat and prevent abuse,” first mentioning the regulation that came into force in 2022 that requires employers to provide foreign workers with information about their rights in Canada.

However, in practice, the Centre for Immigrant Workers (CTTI) deplores that there is no monitoring to ensure that employers comply with this obligation. The organization confirms that many foreign workers have never been made aware of their rights or the grievance mechanisms.

The rapporteur also denounced the lack of systematic inspections in workplaces. These are only carried out after a complaint has been filed, while workers with precarious status are often reluctant to come forward for fear of reprisals.

Furthermore, the rapporteur reveals in his report that between 2023 and 2024, 69% of inspections were carried out virtually and only 9% were carried out without being announced in advance.

He also points out that “in certain sectors which employ a large number of temporary foreign workers, it is not possible to carry out effective labour inspections due to the nature of the activity.”

Moreover, even when precarious workers manage to denounce violations of their rights by their employers, they are forced to resort to several federal and provincial mechanisms to report different types of abuses, given that the TFWP is administered by the federal government, but the control of labour, health and safety standards is primarily the responsibility of provincial and territorial authorities.

According to the workers met by the rapporteur, “the provincial authorities […] sometimes refuse to intervene, wrongly claiming that they are not bound by the standards specific to a particular province,” the report says.

At the end of the conference, as well as in his report, the rapporteur calls on Canada to remedy this lack of coordination between the different levels of government in order to fully monitor respect for the rights of migrant workers.

The Quebec Commission for Standards, Equity, Health and Safety at Work (CNESST) had not responded to our questions at the time of publication.